


to the wild and to the both of us

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Chasind, Chasind Hawke, Coming of Age, Family Feels, Gen, Mabari, Ostagar, POV Outsider, Prologue, Red Hawke, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 11:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14670564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: 'He’d fought with Mother on it, arguing that he couldn’t sit by and do nothing, that he couldn’t sit by and let Maria risk her life while he was sitting on his hands a stone’s throw away in Lothering.'Carver Hawke goes to war, gets his Chasind tattoos, and comes to terms with what it means to be an adult.





	to the wild and to the both of us

**Author's Note:**

> you know where this is going

Carver remembers when Maria came home with her tattoos the first time. 

Mother and Father got into a dreadful row about it, one of the few times he remembers them actually fighting over something with raised words and all; Father had taken Maria out into the Wilds a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, and she came back with her face still swollen and tender, marked with the same inky patterns as Father. It had been a shock, both because he’d not expected it at all, and because he always somewhat associated those markings with harsh words and scoldings, being told to run, or to protect Bethany, or to run to protect Bethany. He didn’t quite know what to do with seeing them on Maria, too.

While Father and Mother had it out, Carver had gone to sit next to Maria out in front of the house. He’d poked her in the cheek to hear her hiss, well worth the dead leg she gave him with a well-placed punch. 

“Does it hurt dreadfully?” he asked.

“A bit,” she shrugged. “It itches, like a sunburn.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes more, listening to the argument inside. Words were thrown around like  _ dangerous _ and  _ heritage _ and  _ recognisable _ and  _ her decision _ . Carver wondered if it really was, though, or if this was her decision like the way taking up the sword was her decision.

“Why’d you do it, sis?” he asked. 

“It’s who I am,” Maria said, after a moment. (Maybe it was. She’d always been more in touch with that side of their history than he and Beth.  _ Feral  _ was the word Mother used when she was being unkind. Carver didn’t know what the word meant, or what to make of it.) “I did it for me.”

“Alright,” he said, and that was it. 

“I’m going to join the army,” Maria said. Carefully, still staring straight ahead into the fields, like she was afraid of looking at him and seeing his reaction. 

“Alright,” said Carver again. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and bunched them into fists in the grass. Dog seemed to sense his discomfort, and padded to his side. Carver wrapped his arms around the mabari gratefully. It was a near thing that he didn’t bury his face into the warm fur.

“Is it?” Maria asked.

Carver scoffed. “No, it  _ isn’t _ , Masha -- what, you turn eighteen and that’s it, you’re off? Leaving to the army? Do we mean that little to you?” He didn’t mean to let it spill out of him, and it shocked him when it did. Dog panted in the circle of his arms, and whined, licking his face.

“It’s nothing against you,” Maria said, sounding pained. She really was awful at speaking her mind. Or maybe her tattoos were just hurting her. Good, Carver thought, a petty, age-appropriate, childish thought. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t tell me not to worry about it! You might die. Do you want to die?” 

“We need the money,” Maria ground out. Carver shut up. “We need the money. Father already taught me how to fight. I can send my pay back to everyone, and make more than I would as a farmer. I got the ink so I wouldn’t forget where I came from. I’m the eldest, okay? Let me do my job. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re leaving us,” Carver repeated. It was what he held onto, not wanting to think about Mother and Father struggling, or how much he was growing lately, Mother tutting and fixing him up in Maria’s hand-me-downs,  making comments on what a hungry boy he was.

“Not forever. Probably not forever.” Maria shrugged again, and finally turned her head to look at him. Carver buried his head in Dog’s fur, not wanting her to see his face. She made a pained noise again, and patted his shoulder awkwardly. Her hand was big and warm on his shoulder. “You’ll have to look out for Beth now. Sorry.” Meaning,  _ I won’t be here to distract you when you’re sad, sorry, _ and  _ I won’t be here to stand up for you when he’s mad and shouting, sorry, _ and  _ I won’t be here to kick anyone’s arse in the village for picking on you, sorry _ .

Carver coughed, a wet noise. “Yeah. Well. Don’t die, or whatever.”

She huffed out a laugh. Maker, she really was a lot like Father, even as she was different from him in a million little ways. She slapped him on the shoulder again, a little harder this time, and gave Dog a quick rub at the rolls of his neck, before getting up and going to practice her form, waiting for Carver to stop crying and scrub his face and pick himself up. He tracked down her old training sword and followed her hesitantly.  _ “Teach me before you go,” _ he demanded. She didn’t say anything about the tears on his face, like she never did, and he didn’t thank her, like  _ he _ never did, and they trained until it was safe to go back inside and meet up with Bethany, who’d avoided all the trouble by closing the door to their shared bedroom and pretending she wasn’t there. Carver wished he thought more like her, at times.

 

He can’t stop thinking about that day, now. It’s years later -- Carver isn’t eleven anymore, for one thing -- he’s stopped growing and everything. He’s eighteen himself now, a real proper man. Things got better for the family after Maria went to the army, much as he wishes he could deny it; there was always something to fall back on during poor harvests. Carver doesn’t remember ever going hungry, not really. He knows that isn’t the case for Mother and Maria. He got his own bed much earlier than he would have otherwise, moving into Maria’s empty one, who would share with Bethany whenever she took leave to visit them. Father had been both kinder and not with Maria gone, as awful as that was: he trained Bethany in magic and Carver in swordsmanship, while Mother kept teaching them chores and lessons from the Chant after they helped in the fields. They were even able to start hiring farm hands, had been able to keep them after Father died. It was a good life. It  _ is  _ a good life. And he isn’t going to let that life be threatened by anything: not by Templars, and not by the damned Blight, either. 

Maria had told them about it in a letter, brusque and messy as everything was from her hand: her words only confirming what the soothsayers said from the Wilds who came to the village to trade. There was evil in the Wilds. Darkspawn. The  _ original  _ evil. Maria’s letter gave a little more information, that the army was recruiting en masse, that the King was allying with the Grey Wardens to fight back the darkspawn horde once and for all from the ruins in Ostagar. 

He’d fought with Mother on it, arguing that he couldn’t sit by and do nothing, that he couldn’t sit by and let Maria risk her life while he was sitting on his hands a stone’s throw away in Lothering. Bethany had been passive aggressive for days, but they gravitated to the same bed every night, squeezing together like children up until the day he left.  _ “Try not to die, or anything,” _ she’d muttered into his hair, and he’d laughed at that. Maker, but he loved her. He swore then and there that he would survive to see her and Mother again, and she called him dramatic and kicked him, and they both laid there until the sun came up and he left to report along with the rest of the troops.

Maria is a sergeant now, with her fancy officer’s bonus that she’s been sending home every month, in charge of one of the squadrons in the company. He doesn’t know if she had to pull any strings to get him assigned to hers, but that’s typical of her -- she’d march on the Black City itself without breathing a word of the effort to spare the family’s pride. Carver hates it about her, as much as he hates that he knows exactly why she does it. He much prefers her tattoos now that he only has Father’s memory to compare them to, rather than the man himself. 

The first two days he doesn’t get the chance to see her in private, too swept away with being assigned duties and training and drills, being fitted for armour and learning to banter with the other men and women he’ll be fighting with. Some of them tease him for preferring a two-hander over sword and shield, wonder if he’s got something he’s trying to prove, if he’s overcompensating for something, maybe. Carver doesn’t know if that sounds better or worse than him refusing to take up a shield in a childhood tantrum because he wanted to fight the same way Maria did, so he keeps his mouth shut and channels his energy into knocking them all on their asses during drills instead. 

“Good, Hawke,” Maria calls out from where she’s overseeing. The others mumble and stare, and Carver flips her off with his free hand as he swings his sword back around. “Cut the fancy shit,” she warns, but her mouth is twitching -- that’s it, he’s made her smile. “Archer, are you getting your arse out of the fucking mud, or staying there until the darkspawn come?” she barks, and Carver helps haul his opponent up so they can take their places again. 

“Is that your sister?” Archer hisses in a low whisper when their blades clash.

“Mate, it’s not my fault you’ve not got eyes,” Carver responds, and takes advantage of the distraction to strike with the pommel of his sword.

Maria finds him afterwards, when most of the soldiers have dispersed and he’s drinking from his waterskin. He has two hours before he’s assigned to patrol the wilds with the rest of the squadron. “You did good,” she says. “My little brother the soldier.”

“My elder sister the sergeant,” he shoots back. “Head not too big?”

“You tell me,” she shrugs. It’s such a normal thing for her -- he feels like they could be having this conversation in the fields back home, in the sitting room, at the tavern in Lothering. Instead they’re preparing for a war. 

“It’s good to see you, Masha,” Carver says, and she startles a little at the nickname, pretending to look displeased, but he knows that pull of her mouth. “We’ve barely had time to talk.”

“We’re not exactly at the tavern,” Maria says, and leans against the wall of the makeshift armoury. “If you stay up after patrol, I’ll find you by the bonfire. Or will you need the rest?”

“I’m not a baby,” Carver grumbles, and she snorts. “I can stay up.”

“Alright,” she says.

“Alright,” he says.

“Walk with me to the blacksmith’s,” Maria says suddenly. “I need to see him about a pauldron, we can visit Dog. And I want you to meet the Ash Warriors before you go out.” 

Carver very nearly jumps at the opportunity to meet the Ash Warriors, even more than he perks up at the chance to see Dog. He’s never seen so many mabari in once place before he came to Ostagar. Maria had told him about the king’s kennels in her letters, but it’s nowhere near the same. The entire camp smells of swamp and unwashed soldiers and  _ dog _ . It’s kind of great.

 

The entire group is sombre when they return from their patrol of the Wilds. It had been easy to tell who had already been on such missions: they had barely flinched when seeing the darkspawn, falling into practiced formations. All the green soldiers, Carver included, had blanched at seeing the creatures in action. He’d seen corpses, listened to lectures on how best to recognise different types and their weaknesses, but it was nothing like seeing them with his own two eyes. He barely managed not to take a nasty scratch from a genlock’s claws, bringing his blade up at the last minute. The grating sound they made snapped him back into battle mode, thankfully, and he’d fought through the rest of the ambush with a clear head. Well, clearish. As clear as he could, in any case.  Archer had thrown up as soon as the last one was dead, and it had taken everything Carver had not to follow. 

Maria slaps him once between the shoulderblades once they’re back at the camp, and he rolls his eyes at her, even as he’s still scared and sweating, ultimately grateful for the gesture. He stores his armour and sword away, wipes down and changes into a clean shirt, and goes to join the rest of the soldiers around one of the many campfires that dot the fields between the barracks. 

Someone’s passing around a bottle of something that smells wretched, and perhaps of plums. Maria’s just taken a swig when he sits down, and she hands it to him wordlessly. He wrinkles his nose, but takes a drink anyways. It almost comes back up, but he refuses to cough. Instead he takes another pull before passing it off, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. 

“You really are grown up,” she says lowly, so nobody else can hear. He’s glad she’s being discreet, at least. Still.

“Shut it,” he says. 

“You wanted to talk.” And he had, at that. They’d spoken a little more at the kennels, giving Dog his fair amount of pats and rubs and kisses, before Maria had left on her errand, and Carver had been dragged into a conversation about kaddis by the Ash Warriors -- actual, honest Ash Warriors! Like from the stories!

“How have you been?”

“I’ve been.”

“You’re a wanker,” Carver sighs, leaning back on his palms and letting his head hang. Maria copies him after a moment. 

“Not really my thing,” she says, with a little huff of laughter.

“Gross.” Maria makes to say something else, and Carver hurries to talk over her. “You know, this fortress was built to fend off attacks from the Chasind, they say.”

“So they do,” his sister replies. “And here we are now, defending it.”

“Our ancestors must want to kick us silly,” Carver says, laughing. His eyes trace her tattoos again, how they frame her eyes, trace down the bridge of her nose and her neck, how they cup her jaw and mouth. When he was still little, he used to make her sit with her chin in her hands and line up her fingers with the marks. 

“We’re not exactly siding with the Imperium. We should be fine. Besides, we’re not the only Chasind here.”

“Aren’t we?” He doesn’t -- Carver didn’t know that he meant it until he says it.  _ We _ .  _ Our. _ This has been something he’s troubled himself over since Maria left for the first time. He always saw their family as split neatly down the middle, something their parents had facilitated, if not encouraged: Father and Maria were Chasind. Mother was a Marcher. Carver and Bethany were Fereldan, same as Maria and Father, but they weren’t Chasind the same way -- they had the dark skin and the features, but they knew the Chant, went to services. They didn’t have tattoos or believe in the Seasons with the same fervor. Father snorted at a lot of what they said, grumbled at others, refused to set foot in the Chantry if he could avoid it. But he didn’t try and tell them stories, respecting Mother’s wishes for the most part. His was a separate world, and one Carver didn’t care about, at that. Or at least, Carver had thought. Thinking back, so much of that had been because Mother and her world was simply  _ nicer  _ than Father’s, more welcoming. The idea of a Maker who embraced all of His children was much more appealing than the harsh gods of the Wilds, four different faces just for War, coming of age rituals bound in blood and magic and superstition.

But there were sweet parts, too, ones he mostly learned from Masha, whispered stories from Before. Father had been nicer before the twins were born, apparently, but Maria had made him promise not to breathe a word to Bethany: it would break her to know that he had been kinder and lighter and less fearful and less frightening before he had an apostate for a daughter, too. She told him about Chasind short-names, how they got  _ Masha _ from  _ Maria _ , about spirit festivals, about paper lanterns Father taught her to make as a child, songs with rhythms heavy with drums, high with winds. Recipes learned from the land, ways to orient yourself by watching the stars. Stories about witches and fairies and monsters in the bog that sounded like legend, but Maria seemed dead serious when she told him that their great-grandmother had been able to turn into a hawk. 

It would be easy to write it all off as worthless, to owe his complexion to his being an Amell like his mother. But ever since Father died he’s been thinking about it, and how he doesn’t have to let the man and his ghost be the end-all definition of an entire culture.

He doesn’t know a lot about it, this part of him, but he’s only eighteen, and he has time to learn. So:  _ We _ .  _ Our _ .

Maria is smiling at him now, wide, something that a stranger would confidently be able to identify as one. He can even see her teeth.

“No,” she says, quiet and proud. “We’re not. I’ll introduce you.”

 

The man’s name is Kosta, and he looks like he could be their kin. He has markings of his own, different from Maria’s, and hair twisted back in thick locs, gathered at the nape of his neck in a tail. There are beads carved to look like foxes woven into them, and more carvings around his neck and wrists.

“Hail, Hawke,” he says to Carver, followed by a phrase he doesn’t understand, and Carver mumbles out an  _ “Uh, hello. _ ”

“Your parents never taught you any of our language either?” Kosta seems genuinely dismayed to hear it.

“I only know one sentence, and it’s  _ I will backhand you so hard, you idiot of a child.” _ He stumbles over it, but it doesn’t matter in the end, because Maria says it along with him, and to his surprise, so does Kosta.

“Your sister told me as well. Disgraceful. Your father is getting kicked by his ancestors in the beyond right now.” Kosta says, shaking his head. “A shaman who doesn’t teach. Nonsense.”

“I think Mother wanted to raise us Andrastian,” Carver offers, feeling both incredibly vindicated to hear someone dismiss Father, yet feeling the inexplicable need to stick up for him at the same time.

“And do you consider yourself such?” the man asks, seeming genuinely curious. Maria has her hands in her trouser pockets, and is looking at the fire, to spare him a second pair of heavy eyes waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know,” Carver says finally. “I was raised that way. But I’m part Chasind, too. Can you be both?”

Kosta smiles at him. “You tell me, Carver Hawke.”

They eat together, hardtack and jerky, soldier’s rations, chased down with that foul plum bottle whenever it comes back around, and water from their canteens in between. Kosta tells them a story about his cousin who could change shapes, who learned to do so from a witch, and Carver asks just how many shapeshifters there are in the Wilds, exactly, which makes him laugh.

He excuses himself to the latrines, and Carver turns to his sister fully.

“He’s a character,” he says.

“He’s alright,” she agrees. “What do you think?” He knows exactly what she’s trying to ask.

“If they were all like him,” he shrugs.

“No use thinking about that now.”

“Maybe.”

Maria looks at him for a long time. “You’re eighteen now.”

“Well noticed, Masha,” he mocks.

“Don’t be an arse. You could get your tattoos.” Those five words seem to stop the world for a moment. He could get his tattoos. His. Carver doesn’t know how to feel about it, the idea settling oddly somewhere in the area around his ribs, caught in his throat like a sob.

It takes him a few moments to respond. “I could, at that.”

“You have time to think on it,” Maria takes mercy on him. “We won’t attack until the contingent from Amaranthine makes it, and the Grey Warden leader is off trying to track down last minute recruits. Think on it.”

“Alright,” he says, and he can’t drag his eyes from her face. She lifts an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t punch him for it, so he counts it as a victory. He doesn’t even try and shove her into the fire when she messes his hair. Kosta comes back and engages them in more stories, asks about theirs, dragging more soldiers into their circle until it’s a rowdy ronde of tales and camaraderie. It makes Carver feel better to think he’s going to fight at their side, now. That was probably the point, when he thinks about it.

And he does, over the next few days. Think about it, that is. Not just about his fellow soldiers, and their lives and pasts and futures and how he’s terrified of losing even one of them, but his own, too. He thinks about it during drills, during meals, cleaning duty or the far more terrible latrine duty. He complains heavily during both of the latter, but he still does it, which has Maria sighing heavily at him and shaking her head and gets him a few jeers from the others, but, come on. It’s shit. Literally. But that’s besides the point, which is that he thinks about it. And he realises that he has questions, and he has answers, and they aren’t necessarily ones he likes, but maybe that’s important, too. The contingent from Amaranthine arrives and has time to settle. The king and Teryn Loghain argue in their tents every day. They say that Warden Commander Duncan is never returning, or he’s been slain, or he’s a few days away, depending on who says it.

Carver tracks down Maria where she’s tending her weapons. 

“I thought about it,” he says. 

“And? Sit.” Maria says. He drops down next to her on the bench, and when she offers him a spare whetstone, he takes his own sword out. “Timing’s good. Duncan’s back soon.”

They sit in the quiet for a few moments but for the sound of sharpening swords. 

“I hate him,” Carver says.

“Who, Duncan?” He shoots her a dirty look. “Oh. Father.”

“I hate him,” he repeats. 

“No use hating a dead man,” Maria says. 

“Except for how he was a prick to us.”

“And now he’s dead, Carver.”

“Listen, I know you have your -- thing, about dead people,” and now Maria gives him a dirty look, “But could you hear me out for once?”

“I am hearing you out.”

“Okay. Because, I was saying -- I hate him --”

“So you’ve said.” 

“Fuck’s sake, Masha!” Carver exclaims. Maria quiets and looks at him sidelong. He clears his throat, flushing red. “Anyways. I -- yeah. But. They’re not all like him. Or, we’re not, I guess. Because I think that there is a we, and I’m part of it. That’s it. I’m not going to let him ruin it for me, even when he’s dead. He ruined enough when he was alive.”

She turns to look at him then, her marks stark black against her skin, their kind written for all the world to see. Carver looks her dead in the eyes, the same dark brown as his, so dark they could be black. “I’m not doing this for him”, he says finally. “I’m doing this for me.”

“Okay,” Maria says, and she reaches out. It’s like she wants to cup his face, but doesn’t remember how to do it; instead she traces a shape under his eyes with a finger tip, and then brushes his hair behind his ear and drops her hand abruptly. “I’ll talk to Kosta.”

“Does it hurt terribly?” he asks.

“Like a bitch,” Maria laughs. 

“What! When I was little you told me it was like a sunburn!”

“Yes, and it was, a week after I got it done. During? Hurt like a bitch.” She reaches over and pokes him in the cheek, right under his eye, where a dark line will be embedded into his skin soon. 

“And I can’t imagine Father was a comfort during,” Carver mutters, and she snorts. 

“Don’t worry, little brother. I’ll hold your hand.”

He punches her in the arm, and dodges a hit back, and they go back to their weapons in companionable silence.

That night at dinner there is talk that the wardens are back with a handful of recruits. Carver is telling Maria quietly about a conversation he had with an elderly mage woman from the Circle, how she seemed kind and unafraid and wise, and how he doesn’t know what to make of it when Kosta drops down beside him with a set of tools and a flask of wildwine.

“Drink all of this,” he tells Carver, and Carver almost considers stopping then and there. “Do you want them the same as your sister’s?”

Carver looks at Maria. She doesn’t look judging at all. “Maybe not identical,” he says. “But enough to tell we’re kin, yeah?”

“Alright,” Kosta agrees. “I can work with that.”

It’s awful, although the wildwine helps. Maria holds his hand through it as promised, even if she makes fun of him -- “Don’t be a baby,” she says, when tears leak out of his eyes and mix with the trails of blood and ink on his cheekbones, but she holds it all the same, which is typical of her. It takes long into the night -- he can’t keep track of the time, exactly, but Maria starts humming at some point, which is nice, and helps distract him from the terrible stinging. 

Afterwards, he wipes tears and ink and blood away with a clean cloth, and Kosta shows him his reflection in a little hand mirror -- his face is blotchy and swollen, eyes red and tired looking, the tattoos themselves inflamed red and angry around black ink, but. There they are. Kosta went with a lighter design for him, only doing one eye and three prongs on his jaw, but there are the same identifiable features as in Maria’s, in Father’s: the dots on the forehead and the line down his throat, how they circle his eyes -- or, eye -- and frame the bridge of his nose to pronounce the arch and hook even more. It hurts so damn much, but he loves it.

“I love it,” he says, and both elders laugh, and next thing he knows he’s having a poultice spread across the new marks, covering them. 

“Sleep with that on, little Hawke,” says Kosta, and claps him on the shoulder. “Congrats, son. You’re an adult now.” 

And so he is. The sky is dark but bright above them, constellations he doesn’t know by name shining even despite the thousands of torches lighting Ostagar. It’s not that he thought that taking the markings would grant him the knowledge somehow, mystically, but it’s a little disappointing all the same. Carver decides that he wants to learn them. Maybe Masha knows. He’ll ask her, when this is all over. Right now, he basks in her pride, and in his own.

 

Tomorrow they play with the fate of the world. Carver can’t sleep. 

He isn’t the only one -- they’re all tense and edgy, even without having gotten facial tattoos right after dinner. His face burns and throbs, extra hot and itchy like a sunburn, but it feels good. Well, it doesn’t, not really, but he knows the meaning the marks have, and that makes it enough, more or less. The poultice isn’t cool anymore, is drying a little tacky on his skin. Carver rolls over in his bedroll. He can see Maria lying next to him, a few feet away on her own bedroll. She’s flat on her back, picking at the skin around her thumbnail, leaving it ragged as always. Mother would throw a fit. 

“Masha,” he whispers.

“You should be sleeping,” she whispers back.

“Is that an order, sergeant?” 

Maria turns on her side to give him a dirty look, and Carver grins in the darkness.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

“Don’t try and recover my body if I fall tomorrow,” his sister says, without hesitation, and he flinches as if he’d seen her fall then and there.

“Maker above, Maria,” he hisses, and she laughs quietly.

“You just bled for your gods, and you pick him to call for?” It’s a little accusing, he thinks. Which is fair enough, but -- 

“You can’t say things like that, sister.”

“I can, and I will, and I have,” she says, and she’s stern all over again, Sergeant Hawke, that same harsh no-nonsense allowed tone they both heard throughout their entire childhoods. Father’s voice. “Listen to me, Carver.” Even those are his words. He wonders if she’ll reach out and grab his chin, next.

She doesn’t. Instead she sits up, and leans over him, so her mouth is right next to his ear. He can feel her braids falling over his shoulders and neck. 

“Promise me you’ll leave me. If I fall, leg it with everything you have -- get out of here, get back to Mother and Beth.”

“I’m not a deserter,” he whispers back, mouth barely moving for fear of being heard. He doesn’t want to end up stripped naked in a cage like that poor bastard by the infirmary. 

“I don’t care. Promise me, Carver.”

Carver wants to fight her on this. Wants to push her back and sit up and wave his arms, make a fuss, throw a tantrum like Bethany would. But he’s tired, all of a sudden, and his face hurts, and his stomach is knotted worse than a nest of snakes at the thought of finally fighting the darkspawn tomorrow, at the thought of what Maria is saying, really saying.

“I promise, Masha.”

She hovers over him for a moment longer before slumping back onto her bedroll. “You’re a liar,” she says. “You know I hate liars.” 

“I promise,” Carver repeats, “But you have to promise the same to me.”

Maria looks at him for a long moment. They match, now, even more than they had before. It used to be that people assumed the two of them were the twins, not he and Bethany.  _ Hawkes _ , both of them. “I promise,” she says, and he knows that she means it. She always bloody does. It frightened him a little, when he was younger. In some ways it still does. He exhales, and it isn’t loud over the sound of the rest of their squadron sleeping and snoring and breathing, over the blacksmith sounds in the distance and the changing of the guard. But it still echoes in his own ears. The camp is preparing the final arrangements before the battle tomorrow. It’s all so much more real all of a sudden, something that’s really going to happen. He wonders if the tattoos were a catalyst to his reaction, that he’s a real adult who can recognise stakes now, or if he finally just pulled his head out of his arse.

“Masha,” and Carver has to swallow. He didn’t say anything during the whole time he got his ink, but now, “I’m scared,” he says, and Maria reaches out to clasp his bicep. He brings his other hand up to cover her hand blindly, missing the first few tries. Both of their hands are warm and over-large, with ugly calloused fingers and rough palms, almost identical but for the abysmal state of Maria’s nail beds and the scar Carver has across his palm from dropping a dagger when he was fourteen. 

“Don’t be a baby,” she says again, after far too much time has passed. Carver wouldn’t put it past her if she’s spent the last three minutes weighing the options between offering genuine comfort or being a sarcastic bitch and finally deciding that neither of them would know what to do with her being nice. He appreciates the thought, he guesses, if that was her thought process after all. 

“Cause you’re so tough,” he whispers back. 

He thinks he hears her swallow. “It’s my job to be.” She squeezes his bicep again, and he thinks she’s going to pull away, but she leaves her hand there after all. “Sleep.”

There really is nothing else he wants to say to that, not when she’s so adamantly putting an end to the conversation. “Aye, sergeant,” he mutters, and tries to even out his breathing.

 

It’s all gone to hell. All of it. Ostagar is a massacre, the reinforcements never arriving. Carver would rather go down fighting the monsters, the least he can do, give someone else time to run and save themselves with his last moments, but Archer and Maria find him in the melee and drag him off. He tries to fight them, but Maria strikes him across the face, her gauntlet hard against his already raw face.

“Snap out of it,” she snaps, “We need to get out of here.” She turns to Archer and the other collected soldiers, “Run for it,” she barks. “That’s an order. Fuck this shit.” And they run. Carver whistles for Dog, who has a matching red smear of kaddis across his snout, and he and his sister turn tail and desert, headed back through the darkspawn-infested Wilds towards Lothering. 

He’s so tired, barely sure how he’s still standing -- it’s been days, it feels like, when they find Mother and Beth with packs and sooty faces, heartbroken faces, and he hugs them both, hard, in the wreckage of their hometown, while Maria stamps her feet and tells them to keep moving.

“Lead on,” he says, “I’ve got your back.” They run, shouldering packs when they need to, helping Mother over rubble and through frozen flames courtesy of Beth. Carver wishes he could take her hand and never let go, aware of how close he came to never seeing her again, but he needs both hand on his sword and both eyes alert for lingering danger. They meet a fellow deserter, and a Templar, and Maria threatens him because  _ of course she does _ . But that brings the number of combattants ever up, and Carver starts to think -- maybe, maybe they can survive this. The Hawke family has survived everything that’s been thrown at them so far. They’ll survive this, too.

Then the ogre rushes towards them, rushes towards  _ Mother _ , and as it thumps on its chest and roars, spraying blighted spittle everywhere, Carver sees a million things flashing in the centre of his mind -- he sees the stars above Ostagar, the stars above Gwaren, the stars above Amaranthine, constellations he never learned the stories to besides the ones taught in the Chant; he sees Mother and Bethany exclaiming  _ “Carver, your face!” _ in unison all over again, Bethany in shock and Mother in dismay; he sees his first sword, his first real injury, the first time he managed to knock over Father in training, and then the first time he knocked over Maria; he remembers when Father brought home a mabari puppy and how he was terrified he would bond with his sister, remembers his delight when it picked him as his master and how he’d stubbornly dubbed him Dog; he remembers the pain he was in the eve of the battle, the promise he made on his skin, the promise he made to himself, the promise he made to his sister -- Dog whimpers next to him, as if he knows what Carver is going to do. He always was a smart dog. He hopes he’ll keep an eye out on the others for him when he’s gone. They’ll have time, he knows, Maria won’t let them dawdle, she promised -- they’ll have time to get away, and they’ll be safe.

“You soulless bastards,” yells Carver Hawke, and he charges.

**Author's Note:**

> :^)
> 
> this is the most i've written for this series in one sitting and it's for fucking carver. move over malcolm i guess? 
> 
> the bit in chasind language is inspired by trevor noah's mom from 'you laugh but it's true' bc it made me laugh a lot
> 
> screencaps for tattoo ref: http://greywardcns.tumblr.com/post/173932040317/screencaps-ie-pics-taken-from-my-phone-of


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